I showed my Form La haine yesterday and today. I teach them on Mondays and Tuesdays. They used to be my most dreaded lessons, but now the Nutters on Thursdays and Fridays have taken on that mantle. I was so tired from the trip to Paris and the sponsored walk that dominated my weekend, that I decided it would be admissible to spend a day showing videos. For anyone who hasn't seen it, La haine is a wonderful film, made in 1995 by Mathieu Kassovitz in response to the heavy rioting that took place in the suburbs of large French cities between unemployed youths of immigrant decent and the French police force. It was a hard-hitting, controversial film that portrayed the police as occasional torturers guilty of malicious brutality, the bourgeoisie as insensitive and out of touch, and the youths of the banlieue as disenfranchised, geographically and emotionally 'on edge', and stuck in a vicious cycle of violence and a constant struggle for respect. My students who have seen this film (not only the Form, but Year 10 as well) seem to relate to the three characters at the centre of the drama and I think they enjoy finding out that France is not necessarily defined and limited to their textbooks: they discover another side to the country whose language they have been studying that they did not know existed.
In general, teachers are obviously advised not to do "video lessons." They are a cop out - a lazy way of teaching. This advice is, of course, true. But a well-used video can have an impact that few media can rival. In my own education, for instance, I remember very well the Religious Studies lessons when we were discussing medical ethics while watching Gattaca, and the added impact that a storyline, emotional involvement with characters and moving images bring to a point of discussion.
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I think that I have finally found something that F, from the Form, is actually good at: every morning I have a weekly volunteer check the other form members for correct uniform and equipment. F, a pupil whose (single) mother works two jobs, is often unsupervised in his spare time. This, coupled with a presumably absent father and an older brother whose main hobby is pursuing girls, means that F lacks self discipline of any sort. He is prone to being late, messing about in nearly all lessons, fighting and rudeness, but this week he is my volunteer and he has put his heart and soul into enforcing the dress code, into verifying whether the class have the correct equipment for the school day and, what is more, is far more effective than me in doing so! He puts on his "teacher voice" and mimics me in the process, but it seems to work so I'm happy!
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Three boys from Year 7 were suspended from school for 5 days for bringing a knife into school yesterday. I teach them all and know that they were just being silly, but the very fact that they thought it would be funny to do that is worrying. It suggests that aged eleven they are already steeped in what they perceive to be "street life", this stupid urban culture that thinks it's cool/tough/necessary to carry a weapon. I hope that they will learn their lesson, but since one of them lives with his teenage sister and 14 year-old brother while his parents are living in Angola, I wonder where the 'damn good thrashing' is going to come from.
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